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Juan Velásquez (PhD, '11) is living his dream of impacting lives through science
Juan Velásquez vividly remembers that Saturday in June 2006 when he first wandered onto the quad on the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign campus as a new graduate student in chemistry.Less than 24 hours after landing in the wide-open Champaign County landscape dominated by corn and...
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Stephan Link named Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science
Chemistry Professor Stephan Link is one of three faculty members at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who have been named 2024 Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world’s largest general scientific society. Link...
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Two postdoctoral researchers awarded the Anuj Khandelwal Memorial Travel Award
Two postdoctoral researchers in the Department of Chemistry have been awarded the 2025 Anuj Khandelwal Memorial Travel Award: Dr. Chieh-Kai Chan, a postdoctoral researcher in Martin D. Burke’s group, and Dr. Josseline Ramos Figueroa, a postdoctoral researcher in Wilfred van der Donk’s group. The...
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Chemistry postdoctoral researcher wins back-to-back Science Image Challenge titles
For the second consecutive year, Xiaolin Liu, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Chemistry, submitted a science image that has been selected the winner of the Main Category in the School of Chemical Sciences Image Challenge.  Liu conducts research in chemistry professor...
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Charles Schroeder, Jeffrey Moore, and collaborators receive $1.8 M NSF grant to develop self-replicating materials
Abiotic, or nonliving, self-replicating materials are often a topic of science fiction — but researchers at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign are working to synthetize materials that self-replicate, the same way...

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Spotlight: Tina Huang, director of general chemistry

As a research scientist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Maryland, Tina Huang had the opportunity to mentor college interns and high school students. “I really enjoyed that teaching aspect of explaining things,” Huang said. The experience eventually inspired her to accept a position at Lafayette College in Easton, PA, teaching General Chemistry, Quantitative Analysis, and Instrumental Methods. Eight years later, Huang and her family wanted to move closer to relatives in Kansas. She said she was pleased to land an interview at Illinois. “Another thing that...